Ambitious, Apprehensive Procrastination (With a Quick Glance Around)

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my sad little corner of the internet that like 6.5 people care about. It's been a while! Let's catch up - I am now a sophomore in college, I'm thissss much closer to declaring a major, I still don't get enough sleep, and now I have AC in my room (thank GOD).

Now that that's out of the way, we can move on to discussing more pressing issues, such as all the things I'd like to be doing if I could just figure out how to organize my life well enough to do them.

I am this school year's features editor for a fashion/art/photography publication at my school called ROCKET, and I am, slowly but surely, figuring out just how to do that. My ultimate goal is to not only guide my fellow writers towards their best creations, but to also be a person they can look up to and rely on. Most of us are around the same age, but I'm their beta leader (we also have an EIC, so there's that leader to answer to, as well,) and I want to be a good one. I want to foster a little community between the six of us that allows for a constant flow of communication, ideas, creativity, and of course, friendship. On top of that, I also strive to be the most competent person I can be, so that I'm never left not knowing how to solve a problem. As you can imagine, no one of this is going to come easy, but I believe in ROCKET and the writers and our potential and I am willing to work to achieve these goals. I'm just not going to be able to sleep, ever, apparently. It's cool.

ALSO, before I forget to mention it! I got in an Instagram argument with the LITERAL Marc Jacobs last week! Okay, let me break it down briefly, (I intend to write more about it for ROCKET's website, so I can't get into too much detail but OMGGG).  Last week was the tail end of New York Fashion Week (NYFW). If I'm not mistaken, Marc Jacobs' show was one of the last ones, and it was expected to be big and innovative and awesome. And for many aspects of it, it was. The setting was futuristic and colorful and creative and some big names in the modeling industry walked for him, including Kendall Jenner and both Hadid sisters. But the one glaring problem with the whole show, that has since overshadowed any of the actual clothes that went down the runway, was that despite most of the models being white, or otherwise non-People of Color (POC,) they were all sporting pastel-colored dreadlocks. I saw this on one of the pictures on the Marc Jacobs company Instagram, and commented that while this show was otherwise impressive, it was disappointing to see non-POC wearing dreadlocks, and that if that was the aesthetic they were going for, they should have used actual models of color. THAT'S WHEN THINGS GOT CRAZY. Marc Jacobs HIMSELF, on his actual personal account, commented back and tagged me and one other girl, that it wasn't cultural appropriation, it was just appreciating people and love is all you need, and wouldn't cultural appropriation be when women of color straighten their hair? And other nonsense like that. I WAS STUNNED. Both because he commented back, and because he was SO INSANELY IGNORANT. I commented back trying to break down for him the (many) points he'd misunderstood. From there, SO MANY DIFFERENT NEWS SOURCES AND INDIVIDUALS saw this comment and found my original comment and started tagging me in things and videos and articles and it was NUTS. I shared screenshots of the comments on my Facebook page, and to date, it is the most interacted-with post I've ever shared. I never imagined it would end up like this, but I'm glad I wasn't the only one that noticed how strange and wrong Marc Jacobs was acting. I don't discredit him as a designer or hate him or anything (who's got actual time for that,) but I am really disappointed in him. If he could've acknowledged that he made a mistake, that all would be well, but his response was just so surprisingly childish, that it almost seemed like a joke.

But anyway, aside from being more culturally sensitive than a major fashion designer, my life has been pretty consistent. I did see the Lumineers in concert last Friday, which BLEW MY MIND, and then this week I discovered that stickers will actually stay on my laptop surface, going against what I previously thought. Pretty exciting stuff, I know. Now I just have to try to focus on maintaining that kind of excitement in little, everyday things, which is the ultimate goal, amiright?

The most magical night, the best performers

Seriously, though, I do have a lot of things I'd like to accomplish this year, and hopefully by writing them down, I'll be more motivated to get them done. One of these things is to participate in NaNoWriMo again after having not done it for 2 or 3 years. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and basically you just commit to writing 50,000 words of an original novel during the entire month of November. I've attempted it twice, but I've never finished. This year, I want to change that. I used to love writing so much, and I still do. But I used to be better at churning out stories. They flew out of my brain like oxygen out of my lungs when I'm late for class and have to speed walk. But now, it's like my story well has pretty much dried up. I want it back, so I'm forcing myself to write more. I'm going to start prepping now by trying to write creatively at least once or twice a week, hopefully more. The thing with NaNoWriMo, also, is that it doesn't have to be a good novel, it just has to be a novel. So with that in mind, I think I might be ready to (finally) conquer it.

Additionally, I want to become a better musician, I want to learn how to spend and save money smarter, and I want to get in the habit of living my life in a healthier way - i.e. preparing for things further in advance, sleeping at more normal times, keeping in better touch with friends from home, and of course, eating on a more regular schedule instead of snacking on small things that aren't necessarily doing me any good.

I don't really know what the point of this post was, but I felt like I had a lot of thoughts floating around in my head, and I needed to organize them somehow. Kind of like I need to organize my life, but easier and less time-consuming. :P

To end this post, here's my current playlist, which is honestly my favorite thing to write about, so here you go. :)

Happy Birthday - The Beatles (today is my cousin's 1st birthday and he might be the cutest baby I've ever seen so I had to)
Cartoons and Forever Plans - Maria Taylor
Keep On Loving You - Cigarettes After Sex
Americana Dream - firekid
Hell No - Ingrid Michaelson
Cool Blue - The Japanese House
Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now - The Smiths (I stalked one of the new features writers' blogs and this was on one of her playlists and I knew she'd fit in with us right away at ROCKET)
Life Itself - Glass Animals
Season 2 Episode 3 - Glass Animals
Pork Soda - Glass Animals
June, After Dark - Elliot Root
Gemini Feed - Banks
Underdressed - VERITE
Give Me Something - Jarryd James
Babylon - David Gray (this song is SO GOOD, I don't even know what else to say about it, just listen it)
Cool Girl - Tove Lo
American Money - BORNS
Always Love - Nada Surf
Still Not a Player - Big Pun
LOST BOY - Troye Sivan
Laura - Hockey Dad
Flesh Without Blood - Grimes
Closer - Duck House

Art in an Artless World

One of the great things about humanity is that we are constantly creating. For some people that means technological, scientific, and mathematical innovation. For other people, that means physical, musical, literary, and visual creation. I fall into the latter category.

My entire life, until pretty recently, I've wanted to shape my career around some kind of creative action. When I was younger I had many different things lined up, as most kids do. I wanted to be a chef, and an author, and a movie star, and very briefly, a princess. Aside from being royalty, all of those things would have required me to do something you can't learn from a textbook. You can learn to cook, but to be a chef worth her salt (excuse the pun, I couldn't resist,) you need to be able to make something original. Being an author or a notable actress require skills along those same lines. Making art in the real world is something I never questioned; I thought it was just another type of job I could have, like being a doctor or a businesswoman.

Getting older sucks, for a lot of reasons. The first and most awful one that I can think of is that becoming an adult usually means having to admit that you need to stop dreaming and start doing, and sometimes, that means giving up on some dreams. That is my biggest fear. I know what I would like to do, and I know what I should do, and they aren't the same. And so far, I haven't found a way to combine them. Maybe college will help me with that, but I don't see very many options as of yet. This isn't to say that creativity doesn't play a role in most careers, but for me, it's much easier to be qualitative than quantitative, so to speak. I can't stand math, and while I'm fascinated by science, I know myself enough to know that I wouldn't be good at it as a profession. So that leaves me with the humanities and fine arts. Both of which I much prefer anyway. If it wasn't obvious by now, I love to write. That's something that's never changed. So why can't I listen to that instinct and pursue it? For conventional reasons, of course - money.

All jobs require risk, requisites, and responsibility.  In this day and age, though, careers in the STEM field come with a certain kind of job security, because that is the category with the most demand. People look at musicians, writers, and visual artists with disdain and pity until they make it big, and only then is it socially appropriate to give them credit for their choice of profession.

My problem isn't that I want to do one thing but am being forced into doing another - it's that I see the value of both options, and can't pick. Part of me knows that I would make a good lawyer, and that's validated by the fact that nearly all of my friends and family tell me they can see me as a lawyer. No one tells me they can see me doing what I think I actually want to do, which is writing. They like my writing, and they compliment me, but when I bring up that I maybe want to be a writer or journalist, there isn't as much enthusiasm. It's understandable, albeit a little disheartening. No one thinks writing is a profitable career unless you're J.K. Rowling (who also wasn't given much credit until she hit it big, just saying). All I want is to wholeheartedly pursue what I actually want to do, but in order to do so, I need to figure out what that is.

Vincent Van Gogh, my favorite painter, once said "I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance." This couldn't be more true, coming from someone who can attest to a similar situation. I want a job not solely for the prospective profit - I want to spend my life doing something I can be proud of, knowing I put everything I have into making something important, that I also care about. I'm willing to work for it, but I'm terrified that nothing will come of it. I'm also scared of disappointing all the people who thought so highly of me and believed in my potential. But there comes a certain point in a person's life when you have to realize that you can't live your life for other people. You can value their opinions, and consider them carefully, but at the end of the day, your life is your own and you're the one that's going to look back on it one day and either be disappointed or not. That's been the hardest thing for me to grasp. Technically, I'm an adult now, and I need to start making these kinds of decisions. But at heart, I am a child, who wants to make childish decisions with reckless abandon. I just want to go back to when being a princess was a prospective career option, damn it!

Well, now that this post has become sufficiently long enough to become a chapter in my future memoir, I will leave you with one last quote, because why the hell not?

"If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams." -Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Where would we be if Van Gogh decided to become a businessman? With a not so starry night, that's where.